How Durable Are Information Monopolies On The Internet? | Hacker News Reader

How Durable Are Information Monopolies On The Internet?

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8 pointstav3 comments

I saw Wu's talk at TEDxEast and came away unimpressed. Yes, you can compare some aspects of Google and Facebook to Standard Oil (e.g. network effects, economies of scale). But when he makes this connection, he leaves me wondering: if the problem of monopoly is abuse of market power, what happens when a monopoly results in little or none? What's a monopoly when the alternatives are abundant and the switching costs are next to nothing? If switching costs are nil, then even dominant players can't abuse their power without risking being cast aside, so you end up with very well-behaved actors, which is perhaps why Wu can't name any harms.

The point being that the old vocabulary doesn't necessarily have the same meaning in the modern context. Maybe all this time we should have been concerned with market accountability rather than market share.

I agree with you, and want to expand upon this whole "monopoly" concept on the web.

I don't want to turn the discussion into one of semantics, but I've seen this spring up on the internet a lot. From my understanding, Google and Facebook do not have monopolies in the traditional meaning of the word. The fact that there are viable substitutes and the companies not having major monopolistic powers must mean they're not monopolies.

They're generally market leaders in their oligopolies, but don't have the economic power that Rockefeller and JP Morgan had in their day.

No doubt someone will try to argue about the incredible profits, growth, and data aggregated by Google, but with a search market share between 60 and 70%, that's only a majority, not the entire market. As wealthy as they are, even Google couldn't single-handedly bail out a national economy the way JP Morgan could in the early 1900s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

Interesting question. Of course it's very difficult to do more than speculate because the internet as we know it (web, commerce, etc...) has not been around long enough to really give us a good idea.

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